“Max, no,” Gwen said. “Come back. “
Judson leaned down and scooped up the cat. “You don’t want to go running off like that, Max. She’s the one with the food. Not that you need any. You are a little on the hefty side. Do you lift weights?”
“Evelyn said that he’s part Maine coon cat,” Gwen said. “Maybe a lot Maine coon cat.” She switched on the lights.
Max twitched his ears, but he allowed himself to be carried back into the room. Judson set him down on the floor while Gwen closed and locked the door.
“What are you going to do with him?” Judson asked.
“Take him back to Seattle, I guess, unless I can convince someone local to take him in, which is probably unlikely. Max does not have what you’d call a warm and cuddly personality.”
“He looks tough.”
“He is tough. But Evelyn loved that cat. I’m not going to take him to the pound, and if I turn him loose back at the house, he’ll go feral. Cats that go wild don’t do well.”
“In that case, it looks like you’ve got yourself a cat,” Judson said.
“Probably.” She looked at Max. “Of course, if you take it into that blocky head of yours that you were born to be free, I promise not to stand in your way.”
Max ignored her. He went into the tiled bath and took up a position next to his empty bowl. He glared at her from the doorway.
“Okay, okay,” she said. She opened the minibar and took out the eggs. She cracked two into Max’s bowl. “But don’t blame me if you get too chunky to escape.”
Judson went to the minibar. “How about a nightcap while we talk?”
“Good idea. I could use a drink after that encounter with Nicole.”
Eleven
Start at the beginning,” Judson said.
Gwen settled into the oversized wingback chair and contemplated the gas fire on the hearth. The dancing flames cast a warm glow over the small space, but she could not seem to shake a deep chill. Max was stretched out on the cushion beside her. The low rumble of his purr was a comforting sensation against her thigh.
She searched for a place to begin.
“There’s no way to know how many people Zander Taylor killed before he found his way to Wilby,” she said. “And no way to prove that he murdered anyone. Evelyn and I did some research after he died, but it wasn’t easy trying to trace his comings and goings. Neither of us was a professional investigator. But we found hints of what looked like a pattern.”
“How did you piece it together?”
“Zander was very friendly—quite chatty. He talked a lot about how good it was to be hanging out with other people like himself, people who had real talent. He went on and on about how many phony psychics there were in the world. After he . . . died, Evelyn and I made up a partial list of all the places he had mentioned in his conversations. Then we went online to check the local business directories for those locations.”
Judson nodded appreciatively. “You searched for people who advertised psychic services and then you tried to match the names with local obituaries?”
She glanced at him, surprised. “Yes, exactly. We couldn’t think of any other way to go about it. I mean, it’s not like you can go online and search for a genuine psychic private investigator. Zander was right about one thing—lot of frauds out there.”
Amusement briefly lit Judson’s eyes. “Maybe Sam and I should run some ads offering psychic investigations. We’re the real deal.”
She smiled. “The problem is that your ads for Coppersmith Consulting would look exactly like the ads run by the frauds and fakes.”
“So it comes down to, how do you convince people that you’re a real psychic investigator? You’re right. That’s tricky.”
“It was a very time-consuming process, but in the end Evelyn and I found enough matches—deceased fortune-tellers, palm-readers and other storefront psychics who had all died unexpectedly of natural causes—to convince us that Taylor had murdered a lot of people. We stopped searching for victims because there didn’t seem to be much point continuing.”
“Did Taylor tell you about his kills there at the end when he tried to murder you?”
“Yes. He was thrilled with himself because here in Wilby he was at last hunting real psychics, not the phonies.”
Judson drank some of his brandy. “Killing other people of talent made the game more of a challenge.”
“He said he thought it would be harder to kill genuine psychics, but it turned out that real talents were no more difficult to murder than normal people.”
“When did you get suspicious that there was a killer in your midst?” Judson asked.
“Immediately after the first murder.” Gwen stilled her hand on Max’s furry side. Memories of that first terrible day flooded back. “I found Mary’s body out at the lodge. She was lying on the floor near one of the workbenches at the back. I somehow knew she hadn’t had a heart attack or an aneurism. There was something about the way she was positioned that told me she had tried to run. At least, that’s what the ghost was telling me.”
“You saw her ghost at the scene?”
“Yes, in the walls of the mirror engine,” Gwen said. She resumed stroking Max, who twitched an ear and purred louder.
“What’s the mirror engine?” Judson asked.
“The most exotic piece of test equipment that Evelyn constructed. It was her pride and joy. She built it primarily for me. She thought she could use the engine to measure and record the energy patterns that I generate when I go into my talent. Mary died near one of the mirrors, and that’s where I saw her ghost.”
“Did you pick up anything else?”
“Nothing useful,” Gwen admitted. “I’ll give Oxley credit for conducting a fairly thorough investigation. After all, Mary was only in her mid-thirties and there was no indication that she had a chronic underlying illness. But in the end, Oxley couldn’t find anything. The medical examiner ruled that she had died of a heart attack.”
“You found the second victim in the same place three weeks later?”
“Yes. Ben died near the mirror engine, too. My intuition told me that, like Mary, he had been trying to flee when he went down. But again, the authorities called it death by natural causes. In his case it was a little more believable because Ben had severe asthma and some other health issues. I realized I was in trouble on that occasion. I could tell that Oxley’s cop instincts were stirring.”